Microsoft Announces Encryption For Both Outbound And Inbound Emails In Outlook.com

As Microsoft announced last year, Microsoft is today expanding encryption across their services in an effort to reinforce legal protections for their customers’ data. All Outlook.com emails are now encrypted like how Office 365 e-mail works already. This will provide even greater protection for user’s data across all the great Microsoft services that you depend on every day.

First, Outlook.com is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound email. This means that when you send an email to someone, your email is encrypted and thus better protected as it travels between Microsoft and other email providers. Of course, this requires their email service provider to also have TLS support.

Over the past six months, we have been working across the industry to further protect and help ensure your mail remains protected. This includes working closely with several international providers throughout our implementation, including, Deutsche Telekom, Yandex and Mail.Ru to test and help ensure that mail stays encrypted in transit to and from each email service. I’d like to thank each of these companies and the community for the hard work they’ve put in, and for making this additional engineering investment a priority.

In addition to Outlook.com, Microsoft also announced that OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well.

OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, our mobile OneDrive application and our sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive.